Tuesday, 8 November 2005

I suppose Anne and I would place ourselves as middle class, though in terms of antecedents we are a totally disparate pair. Anyway, we hardly ever hunt, shoot or fish; in none of our pursuits do we attempt to ape the upper classes. There is, however, one practice confined largely to the aristocracy, or at least to the well-heeled, which we do follow: laying down wine for our future enjoyment and that of our heirs.Often, we buy some as much as two or three weeks before we intend to drink it. This year we looking even further ahead and have ordered a few bottles for Christmas; some of them are described as suitable for drinking as late as 2009, but of course none will survive into 2006.A munificent government will shortly be sending me £200 as a Winter Heating Allowance, so in keeping with the spirit of this gift we have chosen mostly warming reds: there is nothing like a bottle of something described as "dark, rich and brambly; deep purple layered with spicy blueberry and chocolate Shiraz" for keeping out the chill.Other than on special occasions—religious festivals, family celebrations, weekends and so on—we have made a real effort in recent years to cut down our wine drinking. We have two techniques, recommended by my doctor, to help us with this: one is to buy rather expensive wine so that we can't afford to drink much of it, and the other is to buy really cheap plonk which is so nasty that we don't want to drink much of it.

Ah, but you see, Corey, this allowance is only for extremely old people like me. It's assumed that the young have lots of ways of keeping warm not available to people like us, like burning their draft papers or asking a few Indonesian dancing girls living nearby to call round and get something going.